were both students at the University of Washington, known locally as the U. Dub. Everything was fine until he showed up at a mixer with a cute blond girl named Karen Moffitt. Much to Max’s dismay, Karen and I hit it off immediately, and eventually we ended up getting married. Years passed. Karen and I eventually divorced and she subsequently died, but Max has never gotten over the fact that I stole her away from him in the first place. I think his long-running feud with anyone and everyone at Seattle PD is symptomatic of his long-running feud with me. But then maybe I’m suffering from delusions of grandeur on that score.
Naturally, I harbor no ill will at all about any of this. Right. Of course not. Which is why I read Max’s piece first. It was prominently placed, right there below the virtual fold.
LaShawn Tompkins: 1975–2005
by MAXWELL COLE
Special to the
LaShawn Tompkins was nineteen years old when he was arrested and charged with the brutal rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old prostitute named Aleta Princess Jones. He was twenty-one when he was convicted of aggravated first-degree homicide and sentenced to death. He was twenty-eight when DNA analysis of the evidence in that flawed case caused him to be released from his cell on death row with no new charges filed against him. Now, at age thirty, he’s dead, gunned down execution-style in the doorway of his mother’s Rainier Valley home.
I’ve always been amazed how Max can dredge up yesterday’s news and turn it into fodder for one of his bleeding-heart columns for which someone actually pays him money. I could tell from the opening paragraph this one would be no exception.
As a child, LaShawn was a bright student who got good grades and a series of Sunday school perfect- attendance records from his neighborhood church, the African Bible Baptist Church. By junior high, though, Sunday school was a thing of the past. He was running with the wrong crowd-a much older crowd-that automatically put him on the wrong side of the law. By fifteen, he had dropped out of school, had several juvenile offenses on his record, and was on the fast track as an up-and-coming lieutenant in the local Crips organization. From there it was only a short hop and a skip to death row.
Yes, Sunday school kiddo goes bad. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Had I been reading a hard copy of the story, I would have been tempted to wad up the newspaper and pitch it across the room. There was no way, however, I was going to throw my laptop, so I gritted my teeth and kept reading.
“Despite being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, LaShawn used the time in prison to turn his life around completely,” says Mark Granger, executive director and pastor of the King Street Mission where Tompkins had worked as a counselor since his release from Walla Walla two years ago.
“After being wrongly convicted, he could easily have become hardened and bitter. Prison, especially a death row existence, tends to do that. Instead, LaShawn devoted his life to Christ and to helping those he considered less fortunate than himself.”
It was his wrongful conviction in the death of fifteen-year-old murder victim Aleta Jones that put LaShawn Tompkins on death row. According to Philippa Jones, Aleta’s mother, LaShawn had, in the years since his release, gone out of his way to befriend her and other members of Aleta’s family.
“Two months ago, on the anniversary of her death, we held a prayer vigil in my daughter’s honor. LaShawn was right there with us the whole night,” Ms. Jones said. “I’m sorry he got sent to prison for something he didn’t do, and I’m real sorry he’s dead. He was a good man.”
That’s why detectives investigating Tompkins’s apparent homicide are so puzzled by his violent death last Friday. “As far as we’ve been able to learn, Mr. Tompkins has had zero involvement in criminal activity since his release from prison,” says one Seattle homicide detective close to the case who wished to remain anonymous.
That last comment caught my attention. I wondered which Seattle PD detective Maxwell Cole had managed to cozy up to and co-opt now. The people at Media Relations are the ones who are supposed to talk to reporters. Homicide detectives, even anonymous ones, are expected to keep their mouths firmly shut.
Tompkins had come to his elderly mother’s home on Friday, as he did twice every day, morning and evening, to check on her, to help dispense her medications, and to prepare her meals. There was no sign of forced entry. Indications are that Mr. Tompkins willingly opened the door that allowed his killer access to the home.
“Shawny went out into the kitchen to heat up my Meals-on-Wheels mac and cheese,” said the victim’s bereaved mother, Etta Mae Tompkins. “The next thing I know he was lying there on the floor by my front door with blood everywhere. He was such a good boy, and he was doing the Lord’s work. The only good thing about this is that I know my son was saved and he’s gone home to Jesus.”
Ms. Tompkins may be sustained by faith in this difficult time, but the same can’t be said for many of her Rainier Valley neighbors, who fear some new killer now stalking their streets.
Ms. Janie Griswold, who has lived next door to Etta Mae Tompkins for the past twenty-five years, is very disturbed by what happened last Friday. “It’s one thing for drug dealers to go around killing other drug dealers,” she said. “But when they can walk right up to someone’s front door and just start blasting away, it’s scary.”
Attorney Amy Duckworth, who now works for Gavin, Gavin, and Plane, a Bellevue area law firm, was one of a number of students who worked on LaShawn Tompkins’s case as part of the Innocence Project, an organization devoted to post-conviction examination of DNA evidence. It was their efforts that revealed Mr. Tompkins had been wrongly accused and wrongly convicted.
“I was there in Walla Walla the day LaShawn walked out of prison,” a tearful Ms. Duckworth said in a telephone interview. “It was so inspiring. He just hugged me and thanked me for everything we had done. He was glad to have a second chance. We all put so much work and effort into this, and now to have him end up murdered is a real tragedy.”
And so, while friends and coworkers grieve over the death of LaShawn Tompkins and while investigators try to piece together what happened, plans are moving forward on funeral services that are expected to be held sometime later this week-most likely at the King Street Mission where he worked.
To have a young life redeemed and then so senselessly lost is, I believe, a peculiarly American tragedy.
I was about to go on to the next article when my cell phone rang. As soon as I saw the Queen Anne Gardens number on the readout, my heart fell. Lars Jenssen is an old-fashioned kind of guy. He doesn’t like cell phones, and I knew he would call me on mine during work hours only as a last resort and for the worst possible reason.
“It’s Beverly,” he said.
“How bad?” I asked.
“
Lars is an old Norwegian, a retired halibut fisherman, whose accent gets markedly worse the moment he comes in contact with a telephone.
“I’m on my way,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Driving down 405, I called Mel at work and told her what was going on. “I’ll let everyone here know,” she said. “If you want me to, I’ll drop everything and meet you there.”
“No,” I said. “That’s all right. I’m okay.”
Which wasn’t exactly true. This was hitting me very hard. Beverly Jenssen was my last surviving elder. She and my grandfather had been estranged from my mother and me for many years both while I was growing up and long into adulthood. My grandfather, a man of unbending principles and scant human kindness, had thoroughly disapproved of the fact that my mother had not only gotten herself pregnant outside the bonds of holy matrimony but had also adamantly refused to “do the right thing” and give me up for adoption. It was only in the past ten years or so-and long after my mother’s death-that I had established a connection with them at a time when my hard- nosed grandfather had been on his last legs.
It was then, after all those years, that I had learned how my grandmother, forbidden by her husband to have any contact with either my mother or me, had faithfully followed as many of my exploits as she could. She had kept
